Plants and Health
Plants, animals and minerals have been used throughout history by human civilizations to produce healing drubs. Written records, such as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Bible or Chinese physiotherapy manuals describe the extensive use of natural products for medicinal ends, with Nature still being the most important source of medicines in the whole world.
The World Health Organization has estimated that at least 80% of the world population relies mainly, if not totally, on natural medicinal products. Even in industrialized countries, more than 40% of all pharmaceutical drugs originate from natural sources. Many of these medicines are made with natural ingredients and others are synthetic copies or artificially modified forms of natural chemical products.
In industrialized societies, drugs made from natural sources are increasing in popularity, not as the implementation of a "new fashion", but as the reappearance of an ancient and universal practice, thus opposing the recent competition carried out by the pharmaceutical industry. Allopathic medicine became dependent on man-made chemical products only during the last century. These modern drugs had a great impact on infectious diseases during the 1940s and 1950s, but they did not cure common diseases such as breast, lung and bowel cancer, heart disease, rheumatism or a simple cold. Nonetheless, as far as the effects caused by their frequent use are concerned, the seriousness of such effects has increased.
Evidence that modern drugs are not a remedy for all diseases and that they can harm as well as cure, coincided with an increase in international preoccupation with regard to the depletion and destruction of the world's environment. This apprehension gave rise to a greater awareness of the intricate web of interdependency between living things and also a better understanding of both philosophies concerning the total health of the human being as a whole and natural medicine
Man's knowledge of the healing properties of plants, animals and minerals sums tip remarkably the intellectual and cultural evolution of human civilization. A brief consideration of our ignorance of the world is sufficient to make us wonder, as we consider how primitive societies discovered the healing power of the things that surrounded them. Even more extraordinary is the thought of how closely-related plants, for example, were used for the same diseases by communities settled hundreds of miles away from each another, when there is no evidence that they could communicate and therefore exchange their knowledge of the matter.
Although the same drugs may still be used in different parts of the world, they are frequently applied in different ways in the various systems of treatment. Systems such as Chinese traditional medicine or India's aiurvedic medicine differ from allopathic medicine because they treat the person as a whole. These systems explain that health is a state of harmony, or of balance, both inside our body and between each individual and the environment he lives in. Illness is due to a lack of balance and drugs are applied in order to restore such harmony.
Plants furthermore contain the mineral salts that the human body needs for its good functioning and even favor the working of body's glands as far as the secretion of hormones is concerned. We know that hormones play an extremely important role in all vital processes as they regulate the activity of the body's organs and act as faithful guardians of the good functioning thereof Hormones intervene immediately when there is a lack of one substance or an excess of another in the human organism.
We have at our disposal plants with healing properties so that we can keep our metabolism in order (assimilation and disassimilation), detoxicate blood and organic tissues, expel morbid and strange substances and purify and reconstruct our organism.